The House of Rothschild

by Ferguson, Niall

  Finally, it is important to remember that none of these marriages involved a male Rothschild. As the heirs to the capital of the partnership and to the religious legacy of Mayer Amschel, they had much less freedom of choice when it came to marriage. For this reason, the really problematic relationship was between Alfred and his mistress Marie (“Mina”) Wombwell, née Boyer—not only a Christian but a married woman. Although he may have had an illegitimate child by her (the child’s name Almina suggests a combination of “Al” and “Mina”) we do not know if Alfred ever contemplated marriage; it is conceivable that he dismissed the idea in view of inevitable and insuperable family opposition (though another possibility is that Alfred was in fact a homosexual). Alfred nevertheless committed a sin which his great-grandfather would have regarded as equally grave. He gave Almina a £500,000 dowry when she married the Earl of Carnarvon (in addition to settling his debts of £150,000) and left a large portion of his £1.5 million estate to them and their children (£125,000 and the house in Seamore Place).35

  In short, the various “mixed” marriages described above should not be taken as evidence of a profound change in attitudes. Still, it is hard to imagine them happening while James still lived. The fact that all the marriages involved an alliance with aristocratic families (with the partial exception of Constance’s to Cyril Flower, who was made a peer only later) is no coincidence. The social benefits of association of the English and French elite, it might be thought, were felt to outweigh the costs of religious compromise. But it would be wrong to imply a kind of strategy of social advancement. To some extent, as the Jewish Chronicle suggested, it was precisely the fact of the Rothschilds’ social advancement which made such marriages happen: Constance had met Cyril Flower because her cousin had been to Cambridge; Hannah met Rosebery because her father was an established political and sporting figure (they are said to have been introduced by Mary Anne Disraeli at Newmarket) and because Ferdinand knew Rosebery well. As Cassis has shown, a very high proportion of late nineteenth-century City bankers married the daughters of aristocrats (no fewer than 38 per cent of the private bankers in his sample and at least 24 per cent of all bankers and bank directors).

  The question of the relationship between the Rothschilds of this period and the aristocracy has often been discussed. The point is made that Natty’s elevation to the peerage in 1885 represented the final triumph of the campaign for social assimilation which the Rothschilds had waged since the time of Mayer Amschel. At the same time, those who argue that a process of “feudalisation” sapped the entrepreneurial and/or liberal spirit of the bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century cite this as an archetype. The reality is more complex. The transition from baronet to hereditary peer had its roots in Rothschild relations with successive Prime Ministers as well as with members of the royal family; for social promotion was at once a reward for political or public service and a sign of royal favour. It is also worth noting that, as with the rights of Jews to take their seats in the Lower House of Parliament, England was in some ways behind some continental states.

  The Austrian case illustrates the subtle gradations of status involved. Technically, the Rothschilds had first acquired noble status—the prefix “von” and a coat of arms—from the Habsburg Emperor as early as 1816, adding the title “Baron” (Freiherr) six years later. However, it was not until 1861 that a Rothschild—Anselm—was given the political equivalent of a peerage, a seat in the Reichsrat or imperial council. And the ultimate social achievement—the right to be presented at court—did not come until December 1887, when Albert and his wife were formally declared hoffähig. As The Times reported, this was “the first time that such a privilege has been conceded in Austria to persons of the Jewish religion, and the event is causing a sensation in society.” It was only after this that members of the Rothschild family and members of the Austrian royal family began to mix socially in Austria itself.36 Nathaniel in particular was accepted into Viennese aristocratic society in a way which had entirely eluded his father and grandfather, being addressed with the familiar “du” by such grandees as Count Wilczek, who regarded him as “an unusually charming man and a really noble [sic] character.” The connection to the Metter nichs also remained socially invaluable.

  According to contemporary gossip, Nathaniel had an affair with Baroness Maria Vetsera, who later became the mistress of Crown Prince Rudolph. Moreover, when Rudolph and Maria committed suicide together at the royal hunting lodge at May erling in January 1889, it was Nathaniel’s brother Albert—as chairman of the Nordbahn—who received the first telegraph reports of the tragedy and had to relay the news to the imperial palace. This may be apocryphal, but it is undoubtedly the case that Rudolph’s mother, the Empress Elisabeth, became friendly with Adolph’s widow Julie; indeed, she had just visited the Rothschild house at Pregny in Switzerland when she was murdered at Lake Geneva by an Italian anarchist in September 1898. When Franz Joseph celebrated his diamond jubilee in 1908 with a grand reception, Albert was there—one of the few who attended in civilian dress.

  In Germany, there was a similar progression from elevation to the peerage to social intercourse. Mayer Carl, as we have seen, had been appointed to the Prussian Upper House (Herrenhaus) in 1867 and was treated as hoffähig thereafter. Although he never ceased to disparage Bleichröder’s social climbing—and was beside himself with glee when the latter’s ennoblement did not confer on him the title of Freiherr 37—Mayer Carl himself rarely omitted to mention his own encounters with Prussian royalty, no matter how inconsequential. He and his wife’s work in establishing a hospital for the war wounded in Frankfurt in 1870-71 undoubtedly earned them royal favour. “I have just had an interview with the Emperor which lasted a whole hour,” he gushed in December 1871, “and I need not tell you that we are on the best terms, particularly in consequence of what I gave the Empress for her hospital which seemed to please His Majesty beyond anything else. Louisa is a great favourite of the Empress and Her Majesty delighted in showing her how much she appreciated all she had done ... which is a capital thing for our own interests.” The Empress seems to have been especially friendly. A still closer relationship later developed between Wilhelm Carl’s wife Hannah Mathilde and Victoria, the widow of Kaiser Frederick III and daughter of Queen Victoria, who evidently enjoyed the faintly Anglophile atmosphere of the Rothschild house at Königstein. Although Victoria’s son William II was viewed with deep suspicion by members of the family and harboured quite strong anti-Semitic prejudices, his accession in 1888 did not harm the Rothschilds’ position. In 1903 Wilhelm Carl’s son-in-law Max Goldschmidt was given the title “Freiherr von Goldschmidt-Rothschild.”38

  In England, by contrast, the process happened in reverse, with the Rothschilds winning acceptability at court and intimacy with royalty some years before they were able to secure a seat in the House of Lords; for, despite the fact that it became legally possible for a Jew to become a peer in 1866, Queen Victoria proved strongly resistant to the idea in practice. The Rothschilds were considered presentable at court as early as 1856, when Victoria noticed the “extremely handsome” looks of Lionel’s daughter Leonora at a royal drawing room. The real social breakthrough, however, came at Cambridge in 1861, when Natty was introduced to the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) by the Duke of St Albans. A common enthusiasm for hunting in turn led to introductions for Alfred and Leo. Horse racing played a similar role: Mayer was “delighted” when the Prince “[partook] of his cake, Mayonnaise and champagne” at the Derby in 1864 and again in 1866. Soon members of the family were regularly being invited to court functions or to aristocratic gatherings at which royalty was also present.39 In turn they entertained members of the royal family, principally—though not exclusively—the Prince of Wales.40 In March the following year, he went out stag-hunting with Mayer at Mentmore and two months later he dined at Anthony’s; he and Princess Alexandra attended “an interminable banquet” at Lionel’s in 1871 and the Prince dined at Ferdinand’s along wi
th Disraeli four years after that. The Prince also attended the Rosebery—Rothschild marriage in 1878 (along with his uncle the Duke of Cambridge) and Leo’s wedding to Marie Perugia in 1881—a remarkable gesture of royal religious tolerance.

  In addition to these more or less formal occasions, “Prince Hal” (as Disraeli called him) was also entertained in the more louche style that he preferred: Alfred, for example, could be relied on to produce opera stars like Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti and the actress Sarah Bernhardt at his dinners; another family friend from the emerging world of “show business” was the librettist Sir Arthur Sullivan.41 Ferdinand too knew how to amuse the heir to the throne: when the Prince fell downstairs and broke his leg at Waddesdon in 1898, the story made the national newspapers.42 As an ardent Francophile, he was a regular Rothschild guest on other side of the Channel too. In the summer of 1867. James entertained him at Boulogne. He also visited Ferrières five years later (returning there in 1888); and he lunched with Alphonse at Cannes in 1895. Such contacts did not cease on his accession to the throne—rather the reverse. Members of the Rothschild family were an integral part of Edward VII’s cosmopolitan social circle, along with the Sassoons, the railway financier Maurice de Hirsch, Ernest Cassel, Horace Farquhar and others identified by Edward Hamilton as the “smart set.”

  However, it would be quite wrong to portray the Rothschilds as in any way in awe of the royal family or, for that matter, especially eager for elevation to the peerage. Natty, for example, initially found the Prince of Wales’s conversation “commonplace and very slow.” “He is excessively fond of the chase,” he told his parents,very fond of riddles and strong cigars and will I suppose eventually settle down into a well-disciplined German Prince with all the narrow views of his father’s family. He is excessively polite and that is certainly his redeeming quality. If he followed the bent of his own inclination, it strikes me he would take to gambling and certainly keep away from the law lectures he is obliged to go to now.

  Five years later, he had not changed his view, commenting drily “that war and peace, and the state of politics do not occupy H.R.H. half so much as his amusements.” His mother shared these sentiments. Though she thought the future King “most enchantingly agreeable” with “manners ... not to be surpassed anywhere,” she felt it was “to be deplored that he does not give a portion of his time to serious pursuits, nor any of his friendship or society to distinguished men in politics, art, science or literature.” He had, she concluded (after he left the Commons gallery during a speech by Gladstone), “no taste for serious subjects.” When the Prince won a “large stake” on a Rothschild horse, Charlotte was tight-lipped: “[O]f course, I would infinitely rather he won than lost upon a Rothschild horse—but the future King of England should not go about betting.”

  Nor was it only the Prince of Wales who came in for criticism. When Lady Alice Peel lent her Queen Victoria’s privately printed Highland album, Charlotte was scathing:There is not a ray, indeed not the faintest glimmering of talent or even of pretty writing in the volume, which seems astonishing, as very great and illustrious statesmen pronounce the Queen to be remarkably clever ... [T]he redeeming and truly interesting feature of the work is its extraordinary and almost incredible simplicity; there is not the remotest allusion to royalty or sovereign power; the most humble minded of Her Majesty’s subjects might have written it; not a single word reminds the reader that the writer rules over hundreds of millions of human beings, and that the sun never sets over her dominions ... [I]n reality there is not a newspaper which is not ten thousand times more interesting.

  Ferdinand and Alice shared her dismay at the Queen’s “allusions to the gillies, and the foot-note devoted to ‘John Brown’ [the Queen’s ’Highland attendant‘] and his curly hair.”

  Such attitudes reflected the enduring streak of asceticism which had been inherited from the generation born in the Frankfurt ghetto. Indeed, having risen so far by their own efforts the Rothschilds considered themselves in many ways superior to the aristocracy, not least in financial terms. It was well known that the Prince of Wales and his brothers were inclined to live beyond their allowances provided by the Civil List; keeping up the family tradition of lending to future rulers, Anthony offered his assistance and by August 1874 the Queen was alarmed to hear of “a large sum owing to Sir A. de Rothschild” by her eldest son.43 However, the Rothschilds’ role between then and his accession twenty-seven long years later seems primarily to have been to keep the Prince out of debt, aside from a £160,000 mortgage on San dringham which was discreetly hushed up.

  A less obvious sign of aristocratic, if not royal, financial dependency came when a son of the Duke of Argyll, Lord Walter Campbell, expressed the wish to enter the City as confidential clerk to the Rothschilds’ stockbroker Arthur Wagg for a salary of £1,000 a year. Lionel cautiously “advised Lord Walter to go and speak to the Duke at Inverary, as that proud nobleman might not like his son to enter into partnership with an Israelite”; but Charlotte was gleeful because of the Campbells’ royal connections: “The Waggs will be overjoyed, if the partnership should really take place, to be connected in business with the brother-in-law of Her Royal Highness the Princess Louise. This will be more extraordinary, if it occurs, than the invasion of Caucasian beauties into ... London fashionable society.” Such links between the court and the City were commonplace by 1907, when Leo suggested as a possible director of Rio Tinto “the Earl of Denbigh, a very honourable man, Colonel of the City Artillery and formerly Lord in Waiting to the Queen and then to the King, a catholic peer with pleasant manners.”

  For his part, Natty welcomed such signs of aristocratic compromise. As a strongly Liberal student, he had resented the unearned privileges enjoyed by aristocrats at Cambridge. “I cannot yet make out,” he had complained to his parents, “why noblemen and their sons etc. can take their degree after seven terms and have no Little Go to pass. Both noblemen and fellow Commoners should be done away with, but I am afraid these things never will take place.” As late as 1888—after he himself had become Lord Rothschild—he commented sternly about “the harm which a few of the aristocracy do to their class by frequently displaying a want of sense and honour in money affairs and by resorting to gambling.” The Rothschilds did not think of themselves as becoming aristocratic, even if it appeared that they were; if anything, they wished the aristocracy to become more like them. As Charlotte said, it was better for a younger son of the Earl of Mayo to “earn [a] living in the city handsomely, but by great exertion, activity and labour, instead of starving in the West End.”

  The key to the Rothschild attitude was that, as the nearest thing the Jews of Europe had to a royal family, they considered themselves the equals of royalty. When Charlotte heard that Prince Alfred was to visit Bonn, where Albert was studying, she sought to arrange a meeting between “the gifted scion of the Caucasian royal family ... and the clever scion of the royal family of England.” For other Jews, she declared a few weeks later, “un marriage d‘ambition” meant a marriage to “a Rothschild or a Koh-i-Noor [a Cohen, an allusion to her mother-in-law’s family] ... since there are no jewish Queens and Empresses in the 19th century.” In a similar vein, Juliana and Hannah were “a queen and a Princess of Israel and of Mentmore.” Such notions explain the Rothschilds’ tendency to compete with the royal family. Typically, Natty reported with satisfaction the superiority of his own horse to the Prince’s when they hunted together at Cambridge. Likewise, when Ferdinand went to Buckingham Palace, “he thought and said that no lady was to be compared to his wife—and no equipage to the one that conveyed” them there; and when an especially lavish supper was provided at Stafford House, it was “not royal but Rothschildian.” Invited to dine at the Palace, Mayer set out resolved “to find fault with every thing.” On at least one occasion, his sister-in-law Charlotte preferred a minor family engagement to a royal ball and sought to avoid attending royal drawing rooms, which she found “tiring and tedious in the superlative degree.” And when
the Empress of Austria visited England in 1876, Charlotte was adamant that she had enjoyed her reception more at Waddesdon than at Windsor. Contemporaries often used the phrase “Kings of the Jews” when they talked about the Rothschilds: the evidence of the family’s own correspondence suggests it was not an unwelcome compliment.

  Yet despite all this—perhaps even because of the family’s pretensions—it proved impossible to persuade Victoria to elevate Lionel to the House of Lords. Rumours of such a promotion were current as early as 1863. However, there were those at court who were hostile towards the Rothschilds, a hostility which they were able to express more freely after the death of Prince Albert in 1861. At the time of the Prince of Wales’s marriage, Charlotte complained of the family’s exclusion from the festivities. “Lord Sydney,” she wrote bitterly, “though fed from time immemorial upon all the delicacies in and out of season by all the continental Rothschilds, and not disdaining our dinners either, never thought us worthy of being asked to court. When the poor Prince was alive, dear Papa used to apply to him—when forgotten or omitted. Now one would not like to trouble the Queen.” Another enemy at court was Lord Spencer, who advised that the Prince and Princess should not attend a Rothschild ball as “the Prince ought only to visit those of undoubted position in Society.” “The Rothschilds are very worthy people,” he added, “but they especially hold their position from wealth and perhaps the accidental beauty of the first daughter they brought out.” Nor did Sir Francis Knollys, the Prince’s private secretary, give unqualified approval to the Rothschilds’ intimacy with his master; while the Queen’s equerry Arthur Hardinge felt it necessary to take a visiting Russian royal to Westminster Abbey “as a corrective” after a Rothschild dinner “resplendent with Hebrew gold.” The Prince of Wales himself evidently resisted such pressures. When Natty and Alfred attended a royal levee in 1865, Charlotte was able to report triumphantlythe Prince was gracious, as usual, smiled and shook hands—but H.R.H. has accustomed them to much kindness and cordiality; what amused them, however, was the rebuke he gave to Lord Sydney, who fine gentleman and jew-hater as he is, announced Natty as Monsieur “Roshil”—“Mr. de Rothschild” was the correction he received from royal lips.